Data

What the College Board expects you to walk away understanding

• Everything a computer stores is binary, and the number of bits determines how many distinct values can be represented.
• Compression trades file size against fidelity; lossless keeps everything, lossy discards some.
• Data by itself is not information — information comes from processing, filtering, combining, and interpreting data in context.
• Programs are what make large-scale data analysis possible, and cleaning data is a real, necessary step.

Topics in this Big Idea

Night-before review

Every key term and exam tip from this big idea on one printable page.